


The Nature of Wanting

by Lelek



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-18
Updated: 2010-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-13 18:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lelek/pseuds/Lelek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On wanting, and wishing, and knowing how to tell the difference.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nature of Wanting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sophie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophie/gifts).



> You asked for Alec, so Alec it is! It's basically a character piece, grounded entirely in Alec's head. As such, it went in a dark-ish direction, but nothing horrible. Happy Yuletide!

Alec thinks about death.

He's always been this way, fixated on impermanence, ever since he was a child and first began to realise what it really meant to die. He thinks about other people dying, in all their myriad of ways, interesting and horrible and commonplace and dull, and he thinks about his own death.

He probably thinks about his own death most of all.

It isn't that he _wants_ to die, not really, but death is a fascinating, inevitable thing, and perhaps it could be said instead that he _wishes_ for it.

Wishing and wanting aren't the same thing at all. Wishing is a weak, passive whimsy, nothing in the face of the power of want, and Alec knows better than to mistake them for being anything alike.

Sometimes he wants to ask Richard, who is a bringer of death and so beautiful Alec can hardly stand to breathe around him lest he ruin everything, what it's like to kill. He tries to imagine it, in those gorgeous, aching, splintered moments when he's still lingering somewhere in between intoxication and sobriety, tries to imagine just what it would be like to put a blade in someone and cut them until they were dead. Or to wrap his hands (and Richard always has so liked his hands) around someone's throat and squeeze. Sometimes he even wishes for it, because bodies are fragile (easily damaged, easily broken), and it might be satisfying to see for himself how much or how little it takes.

Richard doesn't have to imagine, even if he wanted to, because Richard _knows_. And so Alec wants to ask, now and again, but he doesn't. He never has and it's entirely possible that he never will because to ask would be to have and to have would mean no longer to want.

Alec likes wanting, likes the fire and the hunger of it. It's addictive and he's sure that he enjoys it as he stands on a knife's edge, still brimming with life to spare.

There are other things that Alec wants. Random, inconsequential things he'll never bother sharing with anyone because they don't matter. No sense devoting his time to laying them out for analysis and judgment, not when there are so many other things about him that people find objectionable and strange.

He wants to take up the flute, an instrument he's never touched, and be spectacularly horrible at playing it, to make room for a thousand new maybes he's never considered before. He wants to collect orange peels and keep them in a neat pile on the windowsill, lifting them to his nose every once in a while to savour the crisp aroma. He wants to buy Richard the most ridiculous hat in all of Riverside, just for the look on his face when Alec tells him to wear it.

That is the nature of wanting: precise, concrete, never too far out of reach. Anything unfamiliar and out of reach is just a wish, with none of the piercing, scalding desperation that makes wanting, that makes it better.

And he does so want to ask Richard about death. But wanting is not the same as wanting to obtain, and Alec thinks that might be the best part of it all.

There's a list in his head of books he wants to read, ever expanding and spreading like a disease, at least ninety percent of its titles lost or hidden at any given time. He wants to find a bar where no one knows him, to be challenged to a drinking game by a stranger who won't be able to walk straight afterwards, to find that stranger's lips on his own, and to find that he likes it.

But liking is also not the same as wanting.

And of this Alec is certain because he wants Richard, wants to twist his fingers in the collar of Richard's shirt and pull (just to feel fabric straining in his hands, against his palms, under his nails), wants to press his mouth to the hollow of Richard's throat and trace rough circles with his tongue.

His throat is just a little bit dry whenever he sees Richard enter a room, and Alec wants to keep him in sight always, always closer and closer and closer again. Almost close enough.

And he always has to have more, more, more, to make the damage worth it.

Damage is the word for it, too, the word that comes to mind when Richard takes him to bed smelling of sweat and blood and life and death, pressing him into the pillows and making him consider the possibility of love. The image of Richard's face as he touches Alec, running hands down his back and through his hair, devouring his mouth, has been forever burned into Alec's mind, and every so often (when he has nothing better to do) he thinks he might not even need alcohol anymore to make him feel lightheaded continuously.

He knows that he already has one foot beyond fascination, teetering recklessly on the edge of an obsession from which he'll never recover, but he likes it, and wants it, and wishes for it all at once. And that makes him wonder, as he feels a sudden rush of longing in his throat (leaving him empty as it passes, everything else pale and dead in comparison) if _obtaining_ might, in fact, be as dangerously good as wanting.

He imagines living in some far-off tropical place, where it's warm all the time and there's rain six days a week with sunshine. He imagines running away with Richard one day and never returning. He imagines asking Richard to teach him to kill, even though he doesn't really like knives (not if he's the one to carry them, at any rate) and would fail appallingly.

He does not want those things, but he does wish for them, if only for a single passing moment when there's nothing else about to occupy his mind.

He does want to ask Richard about killing, but the wanting is a breathless, beautiful thing, so once again he holds his tongue and lets his thoughts move on, ever turning in circles, concentric and overlapping in strange, dark, secret places.

Alec thinks about death.


End file.
